This is Democracy – Episode 30: US Foreign Policy

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Intro voices: This is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.
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Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. We’re very fortunate today we have a great scholar, a good friend, an all-around mensch, Dr. Charlie Edel here with us. Charlie is a former policy maker at the state department, he writes extensively on American foreign policy, on American history. He wrote one of the very best books on one of our most important foreign policy figures in our history, John Quincy Adams. And he has most recently published a new blockbuster book called “The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order.” He co-wrote this with another historian and friend, Hal Brands. Charlie, it’s so good to have you on.
Dr. Charlie Edel: Thanks so much for having me on, Jeremi.
Jeremi: Before we get into our discussion of U.S. foreign policy, its roots and ramifications, we have with us, of course, Zachary Suri for the scene-setting poem. Zachary, what’s the title of your poem?
Zachary: “An Old Forgotten Song.”
Jeremi: Well, let’s hear it.
Zachary: There’s an old forgotten song they used to play when the day broke, broke through with the sweltering sun over fields of bloodied souls, but I can’t remember the words. But I wish I could sing it now in these fields that face a forest of bullets and a fence of carrion cows, I wish I could whistle that tune as I step between the bodies, and I wish I could feel the breeze through the French windows, those lost summer morns as I stumbled through this jungle of dying remains. And I wish you could see this. America, could see my brothers, sisters fall, I wish you could have been there when we stormed against them all, for it feels as if– and in some way it isn’t fair, that I’m the only one who really gives a care.
I wish you could see this, America, because it feels as if this tragedy is only mine to comprehend, as if I am the only one who’s lost, nothing more left to lend. And I wish you could hold my comrade’s arm, could feel how gone and cold it feels, could regret the same things that I do, the wars, the broken deals. I don’t wish that we forget this ever did occur because if I must remember, then you all must concur, and maybe it’s a good thing to see the weaknesses we share, and maybe it will help us when the guns again do flare. And I hope that we remember this day among all other days, this day beneath the blood-stained roofs, the only shelter from the rays.
Jeremi: That’s wonderful, it really picks up momentum at the end, too. What is your poem about, Zachary?
Zachary: Well, my poem imagines sort of the point of view of almost like a post-apocalyptic soldier wandering through this, sort of, tragic battlefield and it’s really about how tragedy can help us, but also how we can move on from tragedy. And how it’s really important that we don’t forget things like that.
Jeremi: Wow, I think there’s a really serious point in that and it’s really the main point of your book, Charlie. Why do you think a sense of tragedy is so important when we think about foreign policy?
Charlie: I think it’s really important because as historical memory has grown from the last time we had a major tragedy, and I’m talking about a full-scale, buckling of the international order, great power war, human suffering unfolding on a massive canvas—the last time that happened was nearly 75 years ago. The last time that we had great power competition was nearly 30 years ago with the end of the Cold War. And so as memories begin to fade, we become forgetful of the reason that we take on the exertions in the first place and we forget that the American-led order, or the international rules-based order, or the liberal-based order— whatever it is that we’re talking about, was actually set up looking backwards as much as it was forward. And that it was in the aftermath of a tragedy that you actually, as a community, would be willing to take actions that were not natural, in order to stave off greater tragedies.
Jeremi: So in a sense, the experience of sacrifice, the experience of great difficulty, disciplines and in some ways, encourages creativity? Is that your argument?
Charlie: Well that is the argument, although of course not universally.
Jeremi: Right.
Charlie: Because the great exception is what happens during the post-war period—or rather the Interwar Period between the 1920s and 1930s.
Jeremi: After World War I?
Charlie: Exactly because it is possible that you can be so scarred from tragedy that your reaction is to forget about it, pretend that it didn’t happen, and imagine that it can never happen again. And actually, I was thinking about this terrific poem that we just heard from Zachary as he was reading it. And, Zachary, I don’t know if you read the opening to chapter 3. He— you guys can’t see when you’re listening, but he’s looking like “maybe not.” (laughter)
Zachary: (laughs) No.
Charlie: But the opening to chapter three is actually your poem in a different form. It is Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., America’s most great, most famous jurist, and he’s giving the most famous Memorial Day speech ever. And what he’s doing is talking about all his fallen comrades– because he was a young soldier during the American Civil War. And he’s talking about remembering them, always remembering the sacrifices, remembering what they undertook to preserve, protect, and enhance American democracy, is what has to be in front of them.
Jeremi: Right, right. It’s almost as famous as the Gettysburg Address, right? Which is of course another memorial address on the Gettysburg battlefield in 1863.
Charlie: Almost as famous.
Jeremi: Almost famous, right. (laughs) Now, Charlie, why does this matter for foreign policy? For many of the individuals who make foreign policy don’t speak about tragedy, right? They often talk about economic interests, they talk about military power, why does this matter for foreign policy?
Charlie: Well it’s a mindset more than it is a policy prescription, I mean this book concludes not with policy prescriptions, but a discussion of first principles and about why we do the things that we do. And it matters, I would argue, because without this realistic sense of dangers that abide near us, and oftentimes are more present than we might expect, it makes less sense for America to undertake some of these unnatural actions that it takes. I mean it’s a perfectly normal reaction for Americans to question, “Why do we have alliances?” “Why do we have military equipment and service members stationed around the globe?” “Why do we leave the American economy open at the near-term, sometimes medium and sometimes long-term expense to certain American workers and industries?” And there are actually pretty good answers to those, and they’re all historical and they generally go to the point that without that deep American engagement, pretty horrible things tend to happen to the international order. But without that memory in front of us, people become less willing to take the actions because it makes less sense to them.
Jeremi: Right, there’s a natural isolationist impulse because we are so far from other areas of conflict in the world.
Charlie: Yeah.
Jeremi: Now of course some would argue that our involvement in different places has often made things worse. Many of my students, I think, feel this way about the Iraq War. Another generation earlier thought about this with regard to Vietnam, so is the problem really under-involvement in the world, or how should we think about this?
Charlie: So that’s absolutely true and valid and in some ways, American deep engagement in the world, in some ways produces, some of those instances that you’ve referred to— Vietnam, Iraq. And one of the things that we talk about is a tragic sensibility, which is the argument that Hal and I make that we really think it’s necessary to recover, does mean, deep engagement with the world, the ability to take timely and enduring action, but that leads to all types of errors, and it has in the past. So another flip side of this, I mean, you know, the ancients, the Classics, the Greeks, probably the Romans more than the Greeks– don’t worry, we don’t get into the Romans in the book, but would talk about the Golden Mean, balance. And so if engagement, action in the world is undertaken to stave off true tragedy, it’s also really important to remember that action can cause overreach. You know, if you remember anything about Greek tragedies from high school English or History or whatever, you know, you first encountered them or didn’t encounter them, the word that should ring in our heads is error, ignorance, but hubris.
Jeremi: Right, right.
Charlie: Over-extension. And if we think about America’s involvement in Vietnam, we can say it did not achieve the objectives of policy makers, but it also ushered in a period of American self-doubt and unwillingness to take action even as international dangers grew as the Soviets were reaching for military primacy. You know if we’re talking today about the challenges to American internationalism, we could debate the causes of that, but a lot of it has to lead back to America’s intervention into Iraq in 2003.
Jeremi: Yes.
Charlie: And you know we can debate the initial wisdom and, you know, the win ability of those wars, but I think it’s a truism to say that when the American people think that their leaders have overreached or stumbled into a quagmire, they are not willing to support further efforts, even when some of those efforts become necessary.
Jeremi: So you think we’re in that space right now?
Charlie: I do.
Jeremi: And what are the pathways forward? What should we do?
Charlie: Well, you know, I’m preaching to the choir because there are two historians in here– two and a half, maybe three if we count Zachary, aspiring historian, but a first one is recovering a sense of our history. You know this is really important for a lot of different reasons, one, because it gives us a national story that we can tell– although it’s a very complicated story. But it’s also important because when we decry some of the things that are happening in our society, like the lack of civil discourse, we can point to the lack of civic education, the lack of history. Actually on the walk over here, we were talking, Zachary and I, about the fact that history, as it’s taught in high schools and in colleges, oftentimes will skip over the bad stuff and stop short of the present. And it’s really important that we not turn away from the bad stuff because that has instructive lesson as well.
Jeremi: Sure, sure. So how do we turn the bad stuff into good stuff though, right? I mean I think one of the real challenges when we think about U.S. foreign policy is really coming up with pathways for success, failure seems everywhere. So what– you talk in the book about the successes the United States had, at least partial successes after World War II. First of all, are there particular lessons there? And then second, how can we think about that history today in world that’s so different?
Charlie: Yeah, so first of all I think it’s important to acknowledge that warts and all, the American-led Post-war order was a smashing success for Americans. The growth of stability and security, the fact that we didn’t have a recurrence to the total buckling of the international– or not once, but twice in the early 20th century. The growth of global prosperity, the advancement of democratic institutions and nations around the world– these are unparalleled successes and that only came about through deep American, both engagement and leadership. That’s a really important lesson to know.
Jeremi: And partnership with other societies, yes?
Charlie: Absolutely. You know I think it’s, today– and we hear this all the time, right? There was a big article that was out earlier today about the president demanding a 50% surcharge on hosting U.S. allies abroad and look, these are actually really important questions that we shouldn’t decry. Why do we have this extensive series of allies and partnerships around the world? And, you know one of the things is, it’s a fair question to say, “Why does America pay a disproportionate share?” I mean we would argue, we do argue in the book, that this is not episodic, it’s systemic, because it’s in some ways the way that we designed the system.
Jeremi: Right.
Charlie: Right? To stop some other historical rivalries in Europe, between Japan and South Korea, but at a moment where the international dangers seem to be rising, it’s more than fair to say, “Others need to pay more.” But the part that seems to be missing from the conversation is that that is likely to happen only with the secret sauce, only with the missing ingredient, of American leadership. Because without that, if you’re a smaller state on the periphery and you’re close to an authoritarian that’s poking you externally and reaching into your democratic institutions, why would you stand up without the idea that you would have support? If we want to see the advancement of market liberalism, of democratic societies, that cannot happen with the world’s leading market economy not taking a vanguard position.
Jeremi: So what does leadership mean, again historically and in our present context? Every American president claims to be exerting leadership and every American president criticizes his predecessor for not being enough of a leader. What, in your study, what really makes for effective leadership?
Charlie: So two things here, the first is– and you’re exactly right to point to this, that we tend to not learn but over-learn the lessons of history, right? In some ways it’s why we kind of swing almost wildly back and forth between doing too much and doing too little. So one thing is to realize that there’s no perfect formula for curing this, you can’t really figure out how to calculate the cost of action against the cost of inaction, but it’s appreciating that there’s danger at both sides.
Jeremi: Yes.
Charlie: But a second one, and this speaks to your leadership question, is noting that consistently, it has been a tough sell for American presidents, for American political leadership at multiple levels to make this argument. It is erroneous to think back to that Golden Age of the Cold War, which wasn’t so ‘golden’ by the way. (laughs) And think that, wow, there was really this giant bipartisan consensus and the American people were completely and always behind this. There were great challenges to this, but the consistent, the constant factor was that senior political leadership, I’m really talking about the president here, recognized– whether or not they came into office that way, that it was American leadership that helped to stabilize the order and that they had to go against the grain of natural impulses to play less involved of a role. So you always had American presidential leaders making the case rhetorically to the American public that it was in their interest to support this.
Jeremi: Right, educating the public–
Charlie: Absolutely.
Jeremi: and also pursuing a set of longer term interests, not the immediate pocketable gains that the United States might have been able to get in the short-term gains.
Charlie: Exactly.
Jeremi: Zachary?
Zachary: So if I understand your point, what you’re saying is that tragedy helps remind us of the leadership role that we play, but isn’t there a significant amount of it that’s geographic? Because if we think about it, America has always been a country that’s surrounded by peaceful borders for most of its history and how does that play into this, sort of like, naive view that America is always safe even though in a growing world, it is not?
Charlie: Oh you nailed the question, Zachary, right? Because I would quibble with you and you even got it, right? That America has always been secure and safe only because, I think back to the early 19th century and John Quincy Adams when America was a young republic, it was not that way. But, as you allude to in your question, America is a really, geographically, seemingly– and actually I would say, secure nation. One of the great geopolitical blessings that America has gotten is that Canada is our neighbor to the North and Mexico is our neighbor to the South and we have got two oceans between us… three depending on how you count if you look up North, too. And so, how do you make this argument to the American people that their fate, their security, their prosperity, the realm in which their values and they’re thinking about democracy, are safe is intimately tied up with what happens over there.
Second point though, and I’m glad you brought up tragedy again because I think we’ve wandered too close to the present. You know, the book starts not with the present, but with the ancient past and we have this puzzle at the beginning that here you have ancient Athens, in some ways the most high achieving civilization that we think of historically, right? You know a Navy that was the best one in the world, an empire that spanned the Mediterranean, a relatively liberal democratic system that was the pride of its citizens, and that we still look at and marvel at today. And yet, the Greeks, the Athenians, were obsessed with tragedy. That doesn’t seem to make sense. Actually, every year, they would gather together, the public funds would fund all their citizens going to the theater benches, and watching plays where horrible things happened. That doesn’t seem to make sense. But the argument that we really unroll in the book is that they wanted to do this on purpose because it was the Greek’s conception that the only way to avoid tragedy was to think constantly about it and therefore as a community, decide what actions you had to take collectively to stave that potential outcome off.
Jeremi: And you say so nicely in the book that we can’t all sit as Americans on theater benches today, so what’s the contemporary version of that?
Charlie: Your books, other historians’ books. I mean, thinking about American history a lot. I don’t know if that’s a good enough answer.
Jeremi: I think it’s a great answer.
Charlie: (laughs) I’m sure you do, so do I. But, it’s important that, you know it’s true, right? We can’t all get into the theater together and if you even think about the Athenian tragedies, I mean they’re a little weird to be honest.
Jeremi: Yeah.
Charlie: And oftentimes they dealt with a mythological past to make odd, oblique references to their present circumstances. But the good thing for us is we don’t have to look back to a mythological past, we have a very real past that’s so real because it’s so instructive. So we just need to recover some of this history and put it in front of us because the alternative is really awful.
Jeremi: Right.
Charlie: The alternative is we’ll understand tragedy because one will come at us. So this is how can you get ahead of this? It’s by being historically involved.
Jeremi: Better to read about it than experience it, per say.
Charlie: Absolutely.
Zachary: But how does the average American voter who taps into almost this like island nation, even though we’re not, but almost like an island nation mentality, who feels almost isolated from the rest of the world, how does that voter going to understand the importance of American involvement in the world when they see their job being lost and we’re sending money to help keep our soldiers overseas?
Charlie: You know that’s a tough question and it’s a vocabulary question that I think we’ve struggled with—policy makers have struggled with. And so first of all, is to simply acknowledge the fact that this is a leadership question, right? And things don’t organically pop up, people have to debate them, we have to see what’s in our interests, what we’re going to push against, but that only happens with the leaders making arguments. And so I would say that, you know, when I served in government, I did it too, I was at fault, right? I would say, you know, “Mr. Secretary, you have to say ‘In defense of the liberal international order’ or ‘the American-led order’ or ‘the rules-based order,'” and that convinced nobody of anything. Right? And so part of this is getting down from the theoretical level because rules-based order, international-order, sounds pretty abstract, sounds pretty theoretical, but actually has real implications. And has real implications not only for the values that matter, I would argue, most to Americans, but also for their pocketbooks, also for their sense of security. And so one of this is beginning to recover vocabulary for how this matters to the average citizen.
Jeremi: So speaking of public education, we have a couple of student questions here. We always like to bring students in. Our first question really gets at how we communicate as a society, especially with new technologies in social media, this is from Zachary Padilla.
Zachary Padilla: Technology has made it easier to interact with the rest of the world; however, it doesn’t necessarily make these interactions positive. How has social media affected America’s foreign policies?
Charlie: Zachary, that’s a really broad question, but it’s one that I think is going to come at us even quicker and quicker. And you know we’re actually taping this here in Austin as South by Southwest is going on, and I think your question gets at the heart of it. I was meeting with some friends who were there— I’m not nearly hip enough to really hang out at South by Southwest.
Jeremi: None of us are. (laughs)
Charlie: None of us are, that’s why we’re hanging out here. But I said, “Hey, am I off that I feel like when I was looking at the lineup for South by Southwest, we’ve had like a lurch and a shift that two years ago we were still talking utopia and now we’re talking dystopia.” And so how does technology affect U.S. foreign policy? Well, technology is agnostic, right? It can be used for good or for ill. And, Jeremi, we were talking about this earlier today, that in some ways the first movers on any new method or mode of communication are disrupters and often those who have pernicious affects because they’ve mastered it before others. But the second wave of communicators begins to figure out, how do you harness this? How do you begin to think through how you can communicate and reach out to average people? I mean, to put it down a little bit more in the weeds to your question, Zachary. It’s an amazingly powerful tool that the average citizen, the average global citizen, and someone who might feel like they’re totally disempowered, actually has the tools to communicate with really senior people.
Jeremi: Right.
Charlie: That’s pretty empowering and that can put issues in front of people that haven’t been put before. The challenge, of course, is it’s a double-edged sword and what we’ve now found, what Facebook has really found, what we’re finding as a society, is that technology also allows those with ill intentions, with evil intentions, authoritarian rulers, to reach and control their own societies, which we’ve seen in a lot of places– certainly like China, in Cambodia, around the world as well, but also increasingly, to reach into democratic societies and futz with them and mess with them. And that’s something that we’re just beginning to put our arms around, how do we defend ourselves better on that front?
Jeremi: Right, right, and so do you see social media being a tool that foreign policy makers will be making more use of?
Charlie: Yes, absolutely because they need to.
Jeremi: And this would be a case where young people need to play a role more than ever, right?
Charlie: That’s right, and young people, because we hope that young people with their ingenuity can help us defeat, A. old people who don’t have good ideas, and B. Russian bots who we need to push back on.
Jeremi: Right, right. Well and it’s so fascinating because you and I, Charlie, were educated to think in terms of doctrines and in terms of strategic chess pieces, when in fact, as important as that is, the mode of communication and the mode of interaction might be as important if not more important, right?
Charlie: I think that’s right, and you know one of the big challenges that something like social media brings up is, how do you get thought? How do you get analysis? Because social media as it’s currently constituted is not really a medium for thoughtful exchange for the most part, right? It’s for very rapidfire exchange and of course, that’s not where policy, hopefully thoughtful, policy and strategy come from. So it’s true, you can be pretty good with your thumbs on Twitter, but how much thought and analysis is there behind that?
Jeremi: Right, and so that brings us to our next student question, this is from Miranda Rodriguez and she’s very direct in asking how she and others can make a difference. Let’s hear Miranda.
Miranda Rodriguez: Many Americans view foreign policy as some intangible thing that only politicians can determine. What can we, as college students in America, do to help strengthen our interaction with the world?
Charlie: Miranda, that is a terrific question. In fact, it’s a million dollar question. So part of it is making sure that you’re literate with what’s happening in the world. Right? We’re overwhelmed, this goes back to the last question and the points we were just discussing, we’re overwhelmed with information, but what does that information mean? You have to make sure that you’re cultivating through your news feeds in a way that you have something thoughtful to take away and understand about them so therefore, people’s views are not pushed on you, but you have an ability to think about them creatively, that’s point one.
Point two, what can you do? America is a very involved, non-isolated country. It doesn’t matter if we have oceans, our trade flows are very much maxed up, you looked in our demographic composition it is more and more international, more and more multicultural. So one of the things that’s important for Americans to do is understand the world and that means getting out and traveling. It is– I can tell you, I have a wife who’s an American diplomat, I am currently living abroad. There is nothing so educational for an American as to spend a little bit of time abroad. One, because it allows you to see your own country with a different set of eyes. It hasn’t diminished, in any way, what I think about the United States or my love for the United States—it’s actually grown it. But thinking about it, talking about it, thinking about how other societies do things, what we could learn, what we could teach them.
Jeremi: Right, and what they can teach us.
Charlie: Absolutely. I think this is a real key ingredient because as the 21st century takes off, as you, Miranda, get to play more of a role on this, if you don’t have the fluency, if you don’t have the ability to understand things from other people’s eyes, you’re going to have less of an ability to shape things.
Jeremi: That’s beautifully stated. You close the book, Charlie, this wonderful book that you and Hal have written on the lessons of tragedy, you close with a number of, I think, very positive suggestions, which is how we like to close every podcast episode on This is Democracy. And I encourage people to read the whole book, in particular to read this section. I just wanted to pull out one of these suggestions that you make, and that’s a suggestion for what you call, “Collective action and communal sacrifice.” Those are words we don’t often use in our vocabulary, but they’re words that I hear from my students quite often and so I think this is a natural connection here. What do you have in mind at the end of this book when you write about that? What are some ways we can visualize that today?
Charlie: One of the ways that we need to visualize this, you know this is a book, we’ve been talking kind of, in some abstract sense if that’s okay, but it’s a book about war and peace. And one of the ways that people can visualize this is that people have to pay more. People have to pay more to take care of others in our own society, or this project is simply unsustainable. People have to pay more to defend it as well. People also have to realize that we’re in this together.
Jeremi: Right.
Charlie: The other thing that I would just, in conclusion, point to here is it can be overwhelming to look at this.
Jeremi: Yes.
Charlie: This is a book that is, I think, optimistic, but it’s called “The lessons of tragedy,” and we’re trying to put some of these tragedies in front of people’s faces because as Hal and I understand it, the warning lights are blinking on the dashboard right now for the type of things that we never want to experience again and they’re happening in multiple locations and in multiple domains. It’s important to have a realistic understanding of what’s going on and what the stressors are to this system because it’s under more stress than it has been. But it’s also important, and this is the communal part, because we take strength and comfort in knowing that we’re not alone in this, in understanding– and this is the message of the book, don’t fall into complacency, which is where I think we’ve gone, but nor should you fall into a sense of fatalism, that there’s nothing that we can do. There’s a lot we can do together.
Jeremi: What a perfect way to think about climate change, right?
Charlie: Absolutely.
Jeremi: We can’t be complacent about it, clearly there are some serious issues, but we can’t be fatalistic and just assume we all have to burn up in a warming planet, there are lots of things we can do. I think one of the real optimistic strengths of your book is that you focus on the ideas and the organization of American thinking and resources, not on the inadequacy of the availability of resources, but more on putting the thoughts and ideas together and that offers such a pathway forward for young people who are ambitious and smart. Telling them, I think, that if they use their brains, many of the problems we confront can be turned into opportunities, right?
Charlie: Absolutely.
Jeremi: And I think that’s just a wonderful way to think about things. Last question, Charlie, what do you hope that young people reading this book will take away from it most?
Charlie: So, last week I was talking about this book and someone said to me, “Is your message fear?” And I said, “Yes, but that’s not the only message.” So the two lessons that I hope– because they’re paired, that young people take away from this, is that the foundations of our order, the foundations of every order historically that you’ve looked at, are actually more tenuous and more fragile than most thinkers understand and that when they break up the results are more catastrophic than we often imagine. So a healthy respect for the fact that what we have done thus far is really enduring but that is no guarantee that it will continue. But fear needs to be coupled with hope and the idea that by doing this we have created something pretty darn good, that it has really advantaged many Americans, although not evenly to this point, and that if we undertake a revitalization of this, recapitalization– the international order, the American-led order is something that’s never been static, we’ve changed it multiple times over the past 70 years, that if we’re willing to do this, we can actually make something that’s good for our citizens and that advantages more citizens abroad.
Jeremi: I think that’s so powerful that the fear that we have to confront opens opportunities for hope, it allows us to see momentum and historical lessons for change that can be applied in our everyday lives and nothing could capture the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt more than that and so much of our podcast, of course, is motivated by just those experiences and perceptions from our past. So, Charlie, this has really been a wonderful Tour de Force and an inspiration, thank you for joining us.
Charlie: Thanks, Jeremi and thanks, Zachary.
Jeremi: And, Zachary, thank you for your poem as always. Thank you, everyone, for joining us for this episode of This is Democracy.
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Intro voices: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music at HarrisonLemke.com. Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday, featuring new perspectives on democracy.
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